1980 Week: Serial

          Perhaps more than any other American movie released in 1980, Serial makes an appropriate cinematic headstone for the ’70s, meaning the spiritual ethos of that wild decade rather than the chronological decade itself. Set in California’s Marin County, that affluent enclave long maligned as a nesting place for privileged white folks with a weakness for cultural fads, Serial concerns a character who’s sick to death of people talking about feelings and self-realization and social issues, because what he really craves is the Eisenhower-era ideal of a secure career and a stable home. This dude dug getting his rocks off during the anything-goes ’70s, and he’s hip enough to grasp why his daughter joins a cult and why his best friend becomes a swinger, but when consciousness-raising compels his wife to seek meaning outside the home, enough is enough. Like the disappointed boomers whom Lawrence Kasdan depicted so sharply thee years later in The Big Chill (1983), the nominal hero of Serial is a man for whom the ’70s left a bittersweet aftertaste.

          Based on a novel by Cyra McFadden, Serial has more in the way of concepts and themes than it does in the way of narrative clarity. Although the picture ostensibly tracks the adventures of businessman Harvey Holroyd (Martin Mull), it’s really more of an ensemble piece. Similarly, although the picture fares best when it cruises along with verbal satire, director Bill Persky and his collaborators unwisely attempt laugh-out-loud farce at many points, such as the hellzapoppin climax. That stuff falls flat more often than not, and the chaos it creates adds to the sense that Serial is an unwieldy mess. After all, the movie involves gay romantic drama, a motorcycle gang, myriad sexual affairs, a suicide, and many other things. Will the real Serial stand up? And for that matter, does the title, which was extrapolated from the source material, really make sense given how the story evolved during the transition from one medium to another? Oh, well.

          Its discombobulated nature aside, Serial contains some wonderful stuff. Mull slays with his signature deadpan delivery, and his rendering of the line “I’m going to love-bomb the shit out of them” is priceless. The name of the movie’s cult, the Church of Oriental Christian Harmony, is a fabulous one-liner. Costar Sally Kellerman’s remark, “I want to talk about how I’m having trouble talking about it,” captures the ridiculous extremes of the Me Decade, as does the bit when Tuesday Weld, as the wife of Mull’s character, castigates Harvey for daring to criticize their daughter in front of friends: “Do you know what you’ve done to her peer-group dynamics?” Mention should also be made of Tom Smothers’ droll supporting performance as a hippy-dippy clergyman, as well as Bill Macy’s fine work portraying the hero’s confused pal. Alas, there’s a lot of stuff in Serial that is the opposite of wonderful. Christopher Lee is horribly miscast, and the portrayal of gay characters is grossly dehumanizing. Whether the good outweighs the bad is a highly subjective matter.

Serial: FUNKY

Oh! Calcutta! (1972)

          During the late ’60s and early ’70s, several counterculture-themed stage shows attracted attention by featuring total nudity, ostensibly to challenge inhibitions and taboos. (Whether the exposure was truly meant to juice ticket sales remains a subjective matter.) While Hair is undoubtedly the most enduring of these once-controversial shows, Oh! Calcutta! may actually capture the cultural moment even more effectively. Instead of conveying a complete narrative about social issues (as Hair does with its storyline about the Vietnam War), the wildly uneven Oh! Calcutta! comprises a series of comic sketches and interpretive-dance numbers. Accordingly, it’s like a sampler platter of attitudes, ideas, and mannerisms from the era of the Sexual Revolution.

          At its best, the show captures the tension that arose between enlightened women seeking sociocultural equality and narcissistic men who exploited “free love” as a means of avoiding interpersonal responsibility. At its worst, Oh! Calcutta! is like an X-rated version of The Benny Hill Show, with breasts and penises and vaginas thrown at the audience as recklessly as the four-letter words with which the script is infused. Plus, since the historical moment to which the show belongs has passed, Oh! Calcutta! seems strange when viewed with modern eyes. The sheer amount of nudity and sexualized content remains startling, but the sense of daring that one presumes the show had in its original iteration has faded.

          In any event, this film of Oh! Calcutta! isn’t really a film. Rather, it’s the theatrically released version of a pay-per-view TV special that aired in 1971. The special comprised a taped performance of the stage show, with added flourishes including a single exterior scene and lots of cheesy video effects (dissolves, superimpositions, wipes, etc.). In short, nothing fancy. Nonetheless, the cast featured in this production is fairly strong, with the biggest name being Bill Macy—a middle-aged comic actor who later gained fame as a costar on the sitcom Maude. (His high point, unless one counts his presence in full-cast nude dance numbers, is a sketch in which he plays a vulgar swinger who wows a new lover with his oral skills.)

          Each of the comic vignettes has a different style, but two stand out as having something worthwhile to say. A scene set in Victorian England features a man trapping a seemingly virtuous woman in a private room so he can take her virginity. Yet as she tells her life story, it becomes clear she’s sexually experienced. The joke is that because she gained her carnal knowledge outside of society’s view, her reputation remains intact. Sly and wry in equal measure. Representing an entirely different style of comedy is a broadly farcical scene involving kooky doctors supervising a sex experiment—by the time the gypsies and the puppy dog run onstage, the piece has reached an apex of controlled chaos. (“It’s the last time we advertise for help in Screw magazine!”)

          More typical, alas, is the scene of fairy-tale figures Jack and Jill, in which Jack has Jill measure his member with a ruler and then reciprocates by inserting the ruler into Jill. (“I got my imagination and my cock,” Jack exclaims. “I suppose that’s enough for a man to have!”) As for the dance scenes, they’re lyrical enough, but the wall-to-wall nudity is distracting. Many posh individuals are credited with writing Oh! Calcutta!, including Jules Feiffer, John Lennon, and Kenneth Tynan, though one suspects that the bigger names merely contributed notions. And that, ultimately, is the vibe of Oh! Calcutta!—a bunch of notions, some more interesting than others, fused by the overriding theme of sex.

Oh! Calcutta!: FUNKY

The Jerk (1979)

          After becoming a household name with bestselling albums and blockbuster TV appearances, comedian Steve Martin conquered the big screen with The Jerk, which he starred in and co-wrote. Instead of merely recycling audience-favorite routines, Martin and co-writer Carl Gottlieb created a proper narrative for the movie, which gives The Jerk a measure of artistic integrity. Moments like an out-of-nowhere kung fu scene break the mood, but for the most part, The Jerk is a sweet little story about an innocent adrift in the big, bad world: Think Forrest Gump with more deliberate punch lines.
          The absurdist vibe is established in the opening scene, during which drunken bum Navin Johnson (Martin) declares: “I was born a poor black child.” The movie then flashes back to the homestead where Navin grew up as part of a happy but impoverished black family. Shocked to discover he was adopted (“You mean, I’m gonna stay this color?!!”), Navin leaves home to find his destiny. A job at a gas station goes awry when a nutjob sniper picks Navin’s name out of the phone book while looking for random victims, and a job with a carnival veers off-course when Navin becomes the boy toy of a psychotic female daredevil. Eventually, Navin falls in love with soft-spoken Marie (Bernadette Peters), and then he learns that a gadget he invented is a runaway success. Wealth doesn’t bring Navin happiness, however, and the sudden loss of his unexpected riches sends him to skid row, bringing viewers back to a reprise of the opening scene.
          Merely reciting the plot does little to suggest the movie’s wall-to-wall whimsy. Martin’s dialogue is filled with offbeat touches, like his character’s predilection for “Pizza in a Cup” and his belief that a thermos is an appropriate gift for a paramour. Martin spoofs Navin’s ignorance relentlessly, so viewers get gems like the letter Navin writes home to his parents: “I think next week I’ll be able to send some more money as I may have extra work—my friend Patty promised me a blow job.”
          Some of the comedy is forced, like the kung fu scene, but generally, director Carl Reiner lets humor bubble up organically from the interplay between cynical modern life and simple Navin. Better still, the love scenes between Marie and Navin are gentle and sweet, foreshadowing Martin’s deft touch with romantic stories later in his career. Reiner, himself a stone-cold comedy pro, gives Martin room to spin his comic webs. In one particularly effective scene, Peters feigns sleep during a two-shot that runs for several minutes while Martin performs an elaborate routine; the sense that Reiner creates of silly things happening in otherwise realistic setting accentuates Martin’s irreverence.
          Ultimately, The Jerk is a bit too lightweight, because when the movie goes for pathos toward the end of the storyline, the transition doesn’t feel natural. However, Martin’s charm and wit are irresistible; Peters is a fine light comedienne (and a voluptuous knockout); and the supporting cast includes pros like Mabel King, Bill Macy, Jackie Mason, M. Emmett Walsh, Dick O’Neill, and Richard Ward. The Jerk is merely the opening act of Martin’s beloved screen career, but it’s also 104 minutes of silly fun with heart.

The Jerk: GROOVY

The Late Show (1977)

          After making his name by co-writing Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and other pictures, Robert Benton graduated to directing with the admirable Western Bad Company (1972), then tackled another beloved Hollywood genre with his sophomore effort. An homage to classic detective pictures, The Late Show proceeds from a decent premise: What happens when an old-school gumshoe right out of a ’40s private-eye flick gets thrown together with a hippie chick so peace-and-love ’70s that they barely speak the same language? Right from the beginning of the film, however, the premise is undercut by Benton’s undisciplined script, which wobbles between comedy, drama, and suspense; furthermore, logic takes a beating as characters make profoundly stupid decisions, survive impossible predicaments, and walk away from crime scenes as if nothing happened. And while it’s a given that engrossing mystery films can sometimes surmount nonsensical narratives (see 1946’s classic but incomprehensible The Big Sleep), The Late Show isn’t anywhere near entertaining enough to merit sorting through its unnecessarily convoluted plot.
          In addition to logic problems and tonal inconsistency, the movie is so slow-moving that it’s nearly interminable for viewers who don’t fall in love with the leading characters. On the plus side, Honeymooners icon Art Carney delivers a terrific leading performance as a crusty old private dick—his character is a tip of the fedora to the tough-but-decent investigators once played by Humphrey Bogart and the like. However, Carney’s costar, Lily Tomlin, comes across as an airheaded flibbertigibbet so preoccupied with “vibes” that it’s as if she’s transmitting from another dimension; she barely stops talking during her scenes, and nothing she says is remotely interesting. This makes the many Carney-Tomlin scenes forced and tiresome, whereas Carney’s fleeting bits with comedy pro Bill Macy have a spark the rest of the picture lacks. As a result of its many flaws, The Late Show is a well-intentioned but dreary oddity that doesn’t come close to hitting the stylistic sweet spot.
          It should be noted, however, that the preceding represents a minority opinion; Benton received an Oscar nomination for his script, and Tomlin got a Golden Globe nod for her performance. The Late Show seems to have far more admirers than detractors, so if any of the above intrigues you, by all means, dig in and, as the saying goes, your experience may differ. For my part, I enjoy nearly everyone involved in The Late Show and was therefore surprised to find their combined efforts so thoroughly uninteresting—the disparate elements of the picture just didn’t cohere for me.

The Late Show: LAME